WASHINGTON ― U.S. President Trump has now attempted to take on the North Koreans in the game of colorful and exaggerated rhetoric. As expected, this is not going well for him. After his latest statement, hardened specialists have turned to dark humor. A contest is underway to choose the right ingredients for a new "fire and fury martini." Making dinner, some are promising to create a dish "the likes of which the world has never seen." And so on. It's one thing when a paranoid and isolated regime uses extreme rhetoric; quite another when the most powerful commander-in-chief does.

The more serious reasons to worry about confrontation between the US and North Korea go deeper than the inflated rhetoric of recent days. Clearly the most dangerous "rogue" in the current equation is President Trump. He is logically judged to be less deterred by catastrophic decisions than DPRK leader Kim Jung-un. The Washington Post, U.S. intelligence agencies and others support this assessment.

A broad array of powers and institutions seem to support the U.S. push for increased sanctions without dialogue. But they continue to embrace a fundamental misconception: that force and coercion are needed to stop the DPRK weapons programs. This concept seems to be based on the idea that the working deals in force in 2001 were rejected by North Korea, so we must force them back to the table and reassemble some updated version of the Agreed Framework (AF).

But two things are wrong with this. First, the North Koreans demonstrated – at that time and repeatedly since – that they wanted to continue that deal, as did the South Koreans, Chinese, Russians and Europeans. The North's nascent HEU hardware procurement was relatively small, and could have been a stumbling block rather than an excuse to end the deal. Instead it was the U.S. that unilaterally rejected the deal, and for clear reasons. Books by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton and others make this clear. Secondly, it has been the refusal of three U.S. administrations to credibly return to the negotiating table that has provoked and enabled DPRK weapons development. It is almost certain that if the AF had been continued there would be no nuclear weapons in the North today.

That history helps explain why we are here. The U.S. Vice President declared in 2003 "We don't negotiate with evil. We defeat it." So a religious/ideological standard replaced a strategic/interests-based standard. This was not an off-hand comment. Officials like Dick Cheney and the whole Republican Party had spent the 1990s railing against negotiating with bad actors. As we have seen, their opposition to negotiations extends beyond Cuba, Iran and North Korea. It now includes China and Russia, as members of Congress threaten to back out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In 2001 George W. Bush unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, against the strong advice of experts on strategy and proliferation. That same year the US administration began destroying the most important regional stability and security arrangement ever achieved in Northeast Asia and its implementing organization, KEDO.

If one were to ask many in the anti-diplomacy group why they have opposed negotiations and deals over the decades, the more honest ones would probably admit to a seductive fantasy: they dream of a clear capitulation of their perceived enemies. Grainy photos of the Japanese surrender in September 1945 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay are irresistible. Of course, there will not be ceremonies like that today. Too many things have changed. But for a party and government running increasingly on myths and fantastical assumptions, such images still have the power to crowd out reason and realism.

Added to basic misunderstandings about DPRK and U.S. goals, confusion continues to reign within the U.S. administration, with Tillerson, Mattis and Trump saying contradictory things. The one thing they will not be clear about is whether possession of an ICBM capability – such as that held by the Russians and Chinese since the 1960s – is now for some reason a justification for a U.S.-initiated nuclear war in Northeast Asia. Despite careless talk by journalists and commentators, there is neither military justification nor legal support for preemptive attacks against a state threatening to defend itself. And that IS the primary nature of the threat, according to the most experienced professionals who analyze the DPRK. So North Korea is both deterred and no more of a threat to the U.S. than China or Russia. Quite a bit less of a threat, actually.

When the U.S. abandoned the AF, and many times since, the North Koreans have signaled they wanted to maintain its broad understandings. Today, the interests of the DPRK in security, international relationships and development, are much the same as they were in 2001, regardless of their weapons programs. This is why Washington and Seoul should only agree to resume a new version of the roadmap – abandoned 17 years ago – if the goal of nuclear rollback and elimination remains. But the policy that has to change is that of the US, because it's interests are the ones that changed. The test for involved states and institutions now is to determine whether the U.S. has returned to the strategic and interest-based goals, or is it holding on to the religious and ideological goals?

One hates to offer specific policy prescriptions to those in power. If these issues are your specialty, then you also know that the jobs of strategic analysis, policy development, bureaucratic control and policy implementation are terribly complex. But right now seems like a rare moment when it would be worse not to do so. So please forgive my brashness.

First some observations.

China was never going to help the U.S. achieve the capitulation of North Korea. Not because they like the North's regime, but because they know pressure will not work, and they remember that the North was willing to forgo nuclear weapons if its security, political and development needs were met. They still wait for the U.S. to become re-involved in returning to the deal.

Even if South Korea had opted for a more independent approach to North Korea, the things it can offer are limited while the U.S. pressures other countries to strangle the North into submission. Therefore, the only offer by the South that would be valuable now is the credible promise to work on the Trump administration to stop its sanctions and pressure campaign and get back to negotiating. Since the ROK administration has fully joined in the U.S. campaign, it has given up what little leverage it had.

Despite hints that US-DPRK diplomacy is underway, evidence is mounting that there is no appetite in the U.S. administration for either negotiations on issues critical to North Korea, or on the nuts and bolts of coordination with Seoul and others on a new roadmap for denuclearization. In other words, the U.S. will not, and institutionally cannot, change its policy approach and credibly talk to the North Koreans.

These three points have major implications for the young Seoul administration.

Since the threat from North Korea is almost entirely the threat to respond to an attack by the U.S., enhancements of ROK missile defenses are more political than military or security-related. This includes statements and actions in support of the THAAD deployment.

And since the impediment to North-South dialogue and a return to regional multi-issue engagement is Washington's need to avoid dialogue and push for Pyongyang's capitulation, Seoul's current embrace of the US policy is increasingly untenable. The North's missile tests have nothing to do with Seoul. The DPRK logically will not negotiate with either Trump or Moon as they both pursue George Bush and Park Guen-hye pressure and sanctions policies.

Finally, since U.S. statements and policies are the main factors pushing North Korea to expand its nuclear arsenal and perfect its missiles, both South Korea and the United Nations have some hard choices to make. After all, the situation surrounding the Korean Peninsula is the exact raison d'être for the U.N. North-South rapprochement is the biggest and most urgent responsibility of the South Korean government, for a long list of reasons.

South Korean and U.N. options are available.

U.N. and ROK leaders may think there is flexibility, so that they can indulge the third U.S. president in the 17th year of increasingly disastrous regional missteps, and somehow steer the U.S. back to the negotiating table. Yet there is no sign of flexibility in the White House, and no sign of a plan to change the current standoff by the ROK or U.N.

Led by the ROK, a new effort would be to expand upon the coalition that is being built by Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, in support of South Korean engagement with North Korea. But it would add increasing detail to a roadmap for action. Seoul would begin meeting with DPRK representatives to develop details, and it would make their participation regular. The Chinese, Russians, French, Germans and others are disposed to follow Seoul's lead, but have not been given a clear plan. Seoul alone can manage this, and it can demand, and get, diplomatic assistance from its friends and partners.

Inevitably, any new effort must include a joint effort by several heads of state to sit with Trump and describe how this roadmap will achieve U.S. objectives, protect U.S. interests, and do what previous U.S. presidents could not. He would have to freeze the global campaign to isolate and starve the North of funds, and he would have to embrace some version of the freeze-for-freeze proposal that has been floated. He would also have to enter into good-faith, no-preconditions talks, perhaps with the sponsorship of the South Koreans or U.N.

The U.S. will not do this on its own. The Seoul government is in a position to move events toward new negotiations and resolutions. The U.N. could help.

Stephen Costello is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. He can be reached at scost55@gmail.com.